Chicisimo could be the Last.fm for fashion

Spanish startup Chicisimo launched last year as a community for fashionistas to share photos of their favourite clothes, tagging them with data about the brands, items and colours being worn.

Similar to Fashiolista (our previous coverage here), a community of fashion-obsessives has built up around the site, voting and commenting on each others’ looks. While there are obvious benefits for helping to push retail sales here, what’s really interesting is the data that can be extracted from the service. Chicisimo recently published a Street Fashion Report that shows how the service could offer Last.fm-like data to the fashion industry.

The data that Chicisimo can drill into is impressive. Top high street brands (Zara and H&M were runaway leaders of the pack here), top luxury brands (Chanel won on this front), most popular colours (black) and best of all – data about current trends in clothes. The startup’s analysis showed that the colour red, vests and long skirts have all increased in popularity amongst photos shared by users on the site in recent weeks.

At present, the dataset Chicisimo is working with is currently quite small. The data for Chicisimo’s report was gathered from 30,000 looks shared by 6 000 users between July 2010 and February 10th 2011. As such, the report can’t be taken as a guide to wider tastes, but as the service knows its userbase (all female, mainly under 35) it will become increasingly valuable as the service expands.

At the moment the data is a nice talking point and some prime fodder for a press release, but if Chicisimo is able to make this information update in real-time like Last.fm, it could actually be a great way of measuring young women’s clothing taste. Offer even more granular data at a price, and I’m sure the fashion industry would be very interested in paying for it.

Chicisimo launched German and Polish versions of its site this week, in addition to the existing English, Italian, French and Spanish offerings.